"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1975)

The world of Werner Herzog (for it can be nothing less than an actual world) is one that does not distinguish between the cinematic and the actual. Herzog has more than 50 films in his filmography, and more than half of those are documentaries; but Herzog does not differentiate between his 'fiction' films and his 'nonfiction': he is capable of retrieving from the substance of life material for the fantastic, the surreal, and the extraordinary. His documentaries are such that they are often stranger than his fiction films. When he does commit acts of fiction, Herzog litters their wake with vassals of optimal authenticity. If a film concerns itself with the psychology of subjected minorities run amok, he uses dwarfs; if with the paralysis of an enclosed culture brought to inertia, he literally hypnotizes the entire cast; if in the investigation of a madman's desire to lift an operahouse unto a hill in the depths of a jungle, he doesn't bother to stage it using special effects: Herzog has it done, dispatches natives to perform the gruntwork, and seduces Klaus Kinski with the very real conveyance of imperialistic power, to the extent that Kinski does go insane with egomania. Herzog is a man of so concrete a word that he has eaten his own shoe in a wager (and was filmed doing it). For Herzog there is no separation of the actual world from the cinematic: he sees in empirical phenomena the burden of dreams. His love for the cinematic is an innate love for the natural world, its terrors, anomalies, & eccentric joys. Unlike the documentarian, Herzog films true life with an eye for its psychological grandiosity, bordering on the fictional & the inherently improbable; unlike the ordinary author of fictions, he distills the conventional plotline and the genre-specific vehicle until it has condensed to the elemental, the supra-natural, the vividly real. The stamp of bizarrerie that so distinguishes Herzog from any director living originates in his appreciation for the permeable borders of the patently authentic and the corrosively fictive. He gleefully films the plainly false as if it were true, and portrays the true as if it were a gross lie.

Herzog above all is a poet of the synthetic order. The elements of the natural world are conjoined with severe psychological truths very often outrageous or violently subtle. Herzog's unique power is in avoiding all manner of heavyhanded symbolism, obstructive metaphor, and selfcongratulatory symmetry. His aesthetic system is formed along a line of ellipses, and his chief technique employs an equal measure of levity and rhythm removed from a tyranny of fixed ideas. His caprices are tools for the psychologically precise.

Kaspar Hauser is the film that demonstrates Herzog's powers as poet. It begins with opera, and ends operatically. We see wild grass in the wind, we hear a voice. "Don't you hear that screaming round you, that screaming men call silence?" Juxtaposition of the natural world to the cinematic. (Interestingly, Herzog's Hauser opens with a shot similar to Tarkovsky's windy grass shots in Mirror, which was released the same year.) Silence here is a music unheard except through our chief and more indulged sense, the sight. The silence of wild grass waving in the wind is a music manifest through the cinematic faculty - our eyes become ears attentive to the rhythmic motion of grass swayed by wind, which itself is evinced by the visible persuasion it bears on the untamed meadow.

We must take into account that the actual german title of the film is not The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - which summarily circumvents any difficulty in the understanding of the film's elliptical themes - but rather the more enigmatic Every Man for Himself and God Against All. This is a very german, very Herzogian attitude toward life: the rite of knowledge is one gained through extreme individuation, at the expense of one's safety. Kaspar Hauser is the classic Herzog hero, an eccentric (played in part by a real eccentric) whose solitary misshapen bark is able to navigate the lash and thrash of tremendous, multiple counterforces, and reach its final port of call. The title is a caprice of Herzog's, meant to dispel any serious intention to realise an authoritative biopic of a strange historical figure, since Herzog's concern is not with the 'enigma' of Kaspar Hauser, but with the comparative lessons to be learned from the advent of such a creature in a world that actively contradicts his plausibility.

Herzog finds in Hauser the prototype for the angelic somnambulist. Hauser is the fulcrum on which the logic of man and the illogic of the natural world are balanced and conjugated in the dream of life we now call the cinematic realm. When Hauser recounts moments of his life, or when he begins to tell a story of which he knows only the beginning, Herzog switches to old stock footage of a faraway city, as if it were taken from a vintage reel, implying that Hauser's memories are memories of films he saw in a past so distant as to be near at hand. Even as he progresses through life and earns celebrity through the weirdness of his discovery & persona, Hauser rues that he was taken out of the dark cellar in which he was, as it were, conceived. In that dark room that housed his dreams and played their motion picture reels like endless films at a private theater, young Hauser played at being a soldier, a 'gallant rider' like his father was. With every advance through the contrived world of human society, the unreal world of his cinematic thoughts & dreams achieves greater authenticity, more uncanny realism. Hauser finds the world of human culture insufferably devoid of truth, filled instead with the malignancies of manmade logic, and rather unconsciously (or consciously, we may never know) superimposes the fabrications of cinema over it, the factual fictions of dreams. He reckons the room in the tower larger than the tower, since everything in the room is near at hand and huge, near to touch and susceptible to immediate validation. A child dreaming in a dark room will give credence to phantasms before he should list the fact of the light switch. The room in the tower is the movie house, the cellar darkroom that birthed Hauser, a world that from its core worlds the tower as an atom worlds a tadpole, or a thought worlds a man; in the garret that nests at the height of a tower lies a miniature tower (and a toy soldier astride a horse who rides toward the dark tower) which from its miniature and irreducible particularity blossoms the greater tower outward into existence. The garret in the tower is inhabited by spectral bodies and archetypal figurines, explored by the still & silent somnambulist, situated at the heart of existence & nothingness: the garret in the tower cannot be evacuated or dissolved as a material thing is dissolved by rivers & tides because it is outer/inner space, permeable & indissoluble, whereas the tower, as soon as Kasper Hauser turns away from it to face the farreaching landscape, vanishes into aire & time.

Dyad of the manmade world of logic, and the ennatured ennaturing cinematic void. Cinema is the dreamlife taken from sleep into life, and the society of the civilized a madness of white noise: cinema, like the natural world, solicits a silence of imagery, in stillness or in motion, which the civilized label 'screaming' and high pitch, and which to the purveyors of stuff and nonsense is unendurable silence. To ordinary men, Hauser is crude, unlearned, mad. But Herzog presents him as sane to the point of seeming insane, clairvoyant. Hauser bears witness to the intelligence of a silent imagistic world (the projection room of his own thoughts) which surpasses the designs of human society. He senses that inert things speak in their peculiar darkness, that animals sense language as a supreme failure of man's, and that apples listen to the sermons made by the wind. Hauser's caretakers attempt repeatedly to convince him that the world is merely man's playground, subsumed under his greater will and lesser whims. One of his benefactors picks an apple from a branch and predicts where it will land: "See, I will throw this apple and have it land at that exact spot." He throws it and the apple bounds past the designated spot a few feet into the grass. Hauser exclaims, "The apple hid in the grass!" The wouldbe empiricist, undaunted by the accidents of fate, takes up the apple again, and instructs a house guest to stop the apple with his foot at the spot he wishes to throw it. Tossing the apple, it bounds over the other man's foot to hide in the grass again. Hauser concludes: "Clever apple! It jumped over his foot and ran away." He tells the men to "let the apples lie down, they are tired."

A similar dialogue occurs when a philosophe visits Hauser with the desire to test his wits. He offers Hauser a riddle to solve: 'You meet a man at a crossroads in which 2 roads converge, one leading to the village of truth and the other leading to the village of untruth. You desire to reach the village of truth, and the man points the way. You have only one question to ask the man. What question will you ask to decide if the man comes from the village of truth or the village of untruth, if the road he points to is the true one or the false?' Hauser ponders it a short while, and the philosophe, impatient with Hauser's slow wits, provides a complex answer deduced by the strictures of logic. To which Hauser disagrees and offers a simpler question to determine if the man is a truthteller or a liar: "I would ask him if he was a treefrog. If he says yes, then he is a liar. If he says no, then I have no reason to doubt him." The philosophe, incensed with the childish response, vigorously refutes Hauser's question-answer as fundamentally absurd and having no place in logic; and he is right, in that a treefrog has no place in logic, since there is no branch of logic a treefrog can cling to as it can cling to the branch of a tree. In this case, the positive and affirmative nature of the Absurd trumps the double negative of Logic - in Kaspar Hauser's pure universe, description always defeats deduction. The deductions of logic work to finalize, secure, and conclude; description works to evade the inevitable, to prolong the motion that all logic predicts will end - so has Scheherazade avoided her own death with perpetual spins, so does Hauser revert to the origins of his conscious life. He is reprimanded for knowing only the beginnings of tales, without a word for how they end, but this habit of his reveals the emotional life in him that seeks the return to the womb of the cellar existence he had. One of Hauser's last memories, another vintage-looking movie reel of a caravan trekking across a vast desert, involves a blind berber who tastes the sand and discovers that the caravan, for many hours in belief that it has lost its course, is still on the right trail northward, and that "the mountains that seem unsurpassable in the distance, are only your imagination." The parable is that the blind berber tribesman, similar to a blind boy who, entranced, imagines the films he watches in a dark theater, can foresee the afterlife in a darkness unsoiled by the factual grandeur of civilization. In Hauser's (and Herzog's) world, it is every man for himself, to each his own darkness given.
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I have been gifted by my friend, E. G. Garcia, some observations on the dyad to be noticed in the semblances shared by Truffaut's The Wild Child and Herzog's Kaspar Hauser. These shall be explored in a later post...